The Order of St Alexander Nevsky, Set of Insignia

comprising:

(i) Sash badge, by Emanuel Pannasch, St Petersburg, 1835, in gold and enamel, in the form of a red enamelled Maltese Cross with gold broad-winged Imperial eagles in each of the angles, their wing tips almost touching, with central painted enamel plaque of St Alexander Nevsky on horseback right, rev., with Imperial Warrant and maker's mark on upper and lower arms of cross beneath the enamel, 56 (including suspension loop) x 49mm, with gold double ring suspension suspending from the original red silk sash

(ii) Breast star, in cloth and bullion, as originally issued with the sash badge; the star with ribbed silver rays and wired sequins, legend in gold lettering with green embroidered wreath on embroidered coral background, outer and inner circles in coiled silver wire, centre with monogram in gold wire on silver wire background, unmarked paper backing, 82 x 82mm



(iii) Breast star, by Nicholls & Plincke, St Petersburg, commissioned circa 1837-39, in silver, with pierced jewel-cut rays, with central crowned gold monogram on a white enamelled background the motto of the Order in Russian, Za Trudy i Otechestvo (for Labour and Fatherland) in gold, with enamelled wreath below on red enamelled background, rev., gilt, with backplate struck NICHOLLS & PLINCKE A ST PETERSBOURG, fitted with Russian-style screw-back suspension with plain separate silver screw-plate, 93mm



(i) and (iii) in a purpose-made burgundy leather case, the lid embossed ST. ALEXANDER., in gold, with silk lining stamped 'Rundell, Bridge & Co./ Jewellers & Goldsmiths/ To The Queen,/ and Royal Family,/ 32 Ludgate Hill.'

Presented by Emperor Nicholas I of Russia to John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, 1837

(i) sash badge: virtually as made (ii) breast star: virtually as made (iii) breast star: small flake of red enamel missing, otherwise extremely fine
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THE ORDER OF ST ALEXANDER NEVSKY was proposed by Peter the Great in 1724 at around the time that the remains of the Saint himself were brought to St Petersburg for reburial.  In 1240 St Alexander Nevsky (circa 1220-63), Prince of Novgorod, had routed the Swedes near the site of present-day St Petersburg.  He defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Lake Pepius two years later.

Originally Peter intended that the Order should be awarded to officers for merit, but he died early in 1725 before his plans could be finalised. The first bestowals were made during the reign of his wife Catherine I, on the occasion of the marriage of Tsarevna Anna and Duke Karl Friedrich of Schleswig-Holstein on 21 May 1725.  The recipients included four of the Duke’s courtiers as well as the Oberhofmeister to the Tsarevna, thereby changing the status of the Order as it had been envisaged by Peter.

When the Order was awarded with diamonds, or to non-Russians, there was no fee. Russian recipients paid an admission fee which, in the reign of Alexander I, was 600 roubles.  The feast day of the Order was 30 August.

THE RT. HON. SIR JOHN GEORGE LAMBTON GCB, EARL OF DURHAM, VISCOUNT LAMBTON, BARON DURHAM (1792-1840)

John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, was not a man who elicited indifference: for much of his life his actions, views and robustly expressed opinions made him either firm friends or bitter enemies. Although he is still remembered in Canada – albeit with mixed feelings – for his part in the early political history of that country, little attention has been paid in the last century to his role in the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium or to his actions in thawing Anglo-Russian relations in the mid-1830s. His place in the pantheon of nineteenth century British statesmen has been overshadowed by those who lived longer and, perhaps, cared more about how posterity would regard them.

These three lots of insignia of Russian Orders of Knighthood bestowed upon Durham is evidence that, despite his many detractors, Durham was highly regarded by some. That he inspired respect from Nicholas I, Tsar of all the Russias, is manifested by his bestowal upon him of the highest honours in his gift. Although it could not be said that Durham was without honour in his own country, his insignia of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath symbolises the metamorphosis of his sovereign, that most obdurate of Hanoverian monarchs William IV, from an implacable enemy to a reluctant admirer. This was a transformation brought about through Durham’s diplomatic skills, exercised during two years’ tireless diplomacy in St Petersburg.

Let us now examine the life and career of Lord Durham, perhaps towards a better understanding of the contradictions of a man known to his contemporaries as ‘Radical Jack’ but with a reputation for aloofness and arrogance almost second to none among his peers, a man who came to be the respected confidant of an autocratic emperor while, at the same time, championing movements for parliamentary reform in Britain that had their conservative opponents fearing civil insurrection.

The Lambtons were, and still are, an eminent landed family from the north-east of England, recorded as having lands adjacent to the River Wear since shortly after the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Civil Wars of the seventeenth century brought several members of the family to military prominence, as well as to their deaths, fighting for King Charles I. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 induced the magistrate Henry Lambton to become active with his fellow Durham magistrates in seeking representation for the city and county in Parliament. In 1685 William Lambton (1640-1724) became the first of the family to represent the county of Durham in the House of Commons and he remained an MP until 1702. His nephew, Henry Lambton (1692-1761), sat for the city of Durham in ‘the Whig interest’ from 1734 until his death, after which he was succeeded in the seat by his brother, General John Lambton (1710-94), who represented the city until 1787, whereupon he was succeeded by his son, William Henry Lambton (1764-97), who sat for the city until his death. William Henry Lambton was the father of John George Lambton, later Lord Durham. As well as bequeathing to his five-year old son the implicit contradiction of an immense wealth based upon the ownership of rich coalfields together with an increasingly radical Whig tradition of parliamentary representation stretching back sixty years, he also – through his early death from tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’) – set an unfortunate precedent that was to have distressing consequences for the next generation. John George Lambton was aged five when his father died in 1797 and so came under the guardianship of his uncle, Ralph John Lambton (?1767-1844), who had succeeded to his late brother’s parliamentary seat in 1798 and who sat for the city of Durham until 1813. Like his late brother and their father, Ralph Lambton had a well-deserved reputation for opposition to government as well as prominent Radical ideals: this was John George Lambton’s political inheritance.

Radical parents or guardians tended to favour liberal educations and so, between 1798 and 1805, the young John George Lambton was educated in Bristol by the Radical physician Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808). In 1805, Lambton went to Eton, where he seems to have made little mark, leaving in 1808. Resisting his guardian’s attempts to persuade him to attend Edinburgh University, Lambton apparently insisted upon being allowed to become a soldier. Accordingly he was purchased a cornet’s commission in 10th (or the Prince of Wales’s Own) Regiment of (Light) Dragoons (Hussars), the Army’s most fashionable and expensive cavalry regiment: this took effect from 9th June 1809. In 1810 he purchased promotion to lieutenant and this was gazetted on 5th May. He seems to have tired rapidly of the military life and so retired by the sale of his commission on 6th September 1811. His resignation from the Army may have been connected with the affection that he had formed in 1811 for Henrietta Cholmondeley, natural daughter of the Marquess of Cholmondeley, and, with an impulsiveness already so deeply a part of his character, he eloped with her to Gretna Green where the couple were married on 1st January 1812; a conventional Anglican wedding followed later in the month. He was active in following his passions for cricket and racing during 1812 and, when he came into his inheritance in the spring of 1813, immediately began to implement plans drawn up for his father in 1796 for the rebuilding of Lambton Hall, later Lambton Castle. His energy undiminished by marriage, sports, games and architecture, Lambton seems to have resolved in 1813 to enter public life in the family tradition and, on 20th September 1813, he was elected as one of the two members for the county of Durham. His political life had begun.

Lambton’s fifteen years in the House of Commons were marred by personal tragedy – his first wife died in July 1815 leaving him with three young daughters – and frequent incapacitation through illness that left him in pain and did nothing to improve his moods. The illnesses that occupied most of his life, his resultant and famously bad temper and his apparent ambivalence and ungovernableness over Reform made him a parliamentarian all too easy for his enemies to misrepresent and for his allies to mistrust. His second marriage, in December 1816 to Louisa, daughter of Earl Grey, brought him happiness, support and male heirs but he ceased to speak regularly in the Commons after 1821; he was created Baron Durham on 29th January 1828.

The 1830s were to be the last decade of Durham’s life, ten years in which great honours and immense responsibility combined with personal tragedy. In November 1830 he became Lord Privy Seal in the new government of Earl Grey: this post gave him a seat in the Cabinet and membership of the Privy Council. Finally in a position of some power and influence, Durham was asked by Grey to work on drafting a Reform Bill – the measure that he had proposed almost ten years previously – and this became a reality in June 1832, although not without the extreme reluctance of King William IV, who harboured deep dislike and suspicion of Durham as a result until almost the end of his reign. While at work on the Reform Bill, Durham was driven to despair by the deaths, in quick succession, of his eldest son, Charles, his mother and the youngest daughter of his first marriage. The strain of work and personal misery almost overcame him.  At this difficult time in his life, Durham also became engaged in foreign affairs, as unofficial adviser to the newly-elected King Leopold of Belgium, who invested Durham with the insignia of the newly-created Order of Leopold in 1832. 

The same year, Durham was asked to undertake a special Mission to Russia, and he and Lady Durham arrived at the great naval base of Kronstadt, in the Gulf of Finland, on 16th July 1832. The Mission consisted of wide-ranging exploratory discussions aimed at establishing the nature of Russian foreign policy towards the West – particularly in relation to Russia’s attitude to Belgium and her actions in Poland – and lasted two months. Durham and the Tsar, Nicholas I, soon established a strong rapport, as New observed in 1929:

‘Thus began that strange friendship between the most autocratic of European sovereigns and the most democratic of English ministers which lasted so long, and had such an important bearing upon the relations between two governments, in which up to this time there had been little but misunderstanding.’¹

As a mark of the Tsar’s regard for Lord Durham, he presented the envoy with a pair of console tables in gilded wood with malachite-veneered tops, which remain in the possession of the family. On the way home, Durham spent the period 6th-8th October in Brussels, where he dined twice with King Leopold and was presented with his Order of Leopold.² He returned to England on 8th October 1832, feeling satisfied with what he had achieved, but lost his second daughter in January 1833 and, feeling increasingly at odds with the government, resigned from the Cabinet on 14th March that year. He was created Earl of Durham and Viscount Lambton nine days later. Although excluded from office for the next two years, Durham was far from idle; he busied himself in cultivating the increasingly politicised Press, fell out with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, over the leadership of the Radical wing of the Whig party, was among those who founded the Reform Club and made himself of service as an adviser to the Duchess of Kent, sister of King Leopold and mother of the future Queen Victoria.

In mid-1835, the Whig government of Lord Melbourne decided that a new ambassador was needed in St Petersburg – there having been no British ambassador there since 1832 – and Durham was the obvious choice, especially for a government anxious to remove such a ‘loose cannon’ from British politics. Shelving his ambition to be Foreign Secretary, a post taken by a safer pair of hands in the person of Lord Palmerston, Durham accepted the appointment, although he wrote:

‘I am put out of the pale of home politics. In this foreign field I may do some good, as I have considerable influence with the Emperor and may establish a better state of things between the two countries.’³

Durham was ordered to proceed to St Petersburg and to take with him in his entourage naval and military observers whose task it was to note and assess Russian naval and military capabilities. The party crossed the Black Sea and disembarked at Odessa on 18th September. Following an audience with the Tsar in Kiev late in October, he reached Moscow on 30th October and arrived in St Petersburg on 5th November 1835. In the 1830s, as much as in 1939 – when Winston Churchill referred to Russia as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’, Russia was barely known and still less understood in the West. Her naval and military capacities were regularly over-estimated and her intentions in foreign affairs were often exaggerated or falsified. Durham’s role, both self-defined and ordained by the British government, was to establish what Russia’s intentions were towards Turkey and any other areas, such as India, where her expansion might threaten Western spheres of influence; it was also to create a climate of mutual understanding between St Petersburg and London.

In all aspects of the defined role of his ambassadorship, Durham not only succeeded but also exceeded the best expectations of his masters in London – to the extent that inveterate British Russophobes believed that, in modern parlance, he had been ‘turned’ by the Russians. He wrote regularly to Palmerston, sending detailed reports on the strengths of the Russian fleets and of the deployment of troops, and his assessments of Russian intentions in territorial expansion. His reports were regarded in Whitehall as models of clarity and of good advice at a time when fear of Russian strength and intentions had assumed hysterical proportions: his conclusion was that, for all her vastness, Russia was too weak to be feared. Writing to him on 7th July 1836, Melbourne said:

‘I consider you as rendering the greatest service to your country and the world by taking a sober and rational view... and by trying to check the extreme violence of feeling and the unnecessary prejudice and suspicion which prevail in this country.’⁴

At the same time as informing and reassuring his British masters, Durham retained the friendship and regard of the Tsar that he had gained in 1832. In 1835 he was able to confide to his diary that: ‘Personally, I am on the best terms with the Tsar...’⁵ One of his earliest – albeit uncritical – biographers, Stuart J. Reid, wrote of the rapport between the Tsar and Durham:

‘It was a veritable triumph of personality. The Tsar Nicholas was a shrewd judge of men, and was quick to detect either flattery or dissimulation. Durham’s open nature, his palpable honesty, the moral courage which lurked beneath his conciliatory speech, his broad grasp of first principles, the practical bent of his quick mind, and the imagination which made the sympathy of his warm heart so effective, all appealed to Nicholas. Even Durham’s weaknesses, love of display, moody depression, the touch of hauteur which marked his bearing, and that strain of impatience which he was not able always to suppress, even in the atmosphere of a Court, were points of similitude between them which promoted mutual understanding.’⁶

The only point of serious discord between the Tsar and Durham was over the question of Poland, where Russian policies of oppression had provoked violent Russophobia in Britain. Since candid Russian ministers observed that Russia’s policy in Poland was little different to that of Britain in Ireland, and in any case Poland was within Russia’s sphere of influence, neither Durham nor Palmerston felt that it was a cause worth conflict and so it was largely passed over in the interests of maintaining harmony. In contrast, an area in which Durham was able to make beneficial changes was in that of tariffs, which British merchants found restrictive of trade: as a result of his representations at the highest level, these were relaxed and for many years Lord Durham was remembered ‘as the best friend that English trade had had at St Petersburg.’⁷

Lord Durham’s embassy to Russia ended in June 1837. By that time, King William IV had, albeit reluctantly, come to appreciate the qualities that Durham had demonstrated as an ambassador and, perhaps conscious that on all Court occasions in Russia Durham would have worn the insignia of his two foreign Orders, decided that it was time that Lord Durham wore some outward mark of Royal approval; thus the King created Durham a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, in the civil division of the Order, and this news was conveyed to Durham by Lord Palmerston in a letter dated 23rd May 1837. As Durham recorded: ‘I was never so surprised in my life.’⁸ News of this honour must have been transmitted to the Tsar since at his final audience with Durham, on 8th June 1837, the Tsar indicated his wish to confer upon the departing ambassador the Order of St Andrew – Russia’s senior Order of Chivalry. In a letter to Palmerston of the same date, Durham set out what had happened:

‘The Emperor was pleased most graciously and cordially to congratulate me on the high mark of distinction which my Sovereign has been pleased to bestow upon me, and said: “I also am desirous to show the world in the most public manner my sense of the mode in which you have represented your Sovereign, and advocated the interest of your country here. I have therefore written to the King, my brother, and enclosed in my letter the Order of St Andrew, requesting his Majesty to do me the favour of presenting it to you, in my name. It is the highest mark of my esteem that I have to bestow, and I beg you to consider it, not as a proof of my private regard, which you cannot doubt, but as a public testimony of my feeling towards your King, your country, and yourself in your public capacity.” His Imperial Majesty then placed in my hands a letter for His Majesty the King, which I shall have the honour of delivering on my arrival in England.’⁹

Durham left Russia on 10th June 1837. Ten days later, while he was en route home, William IV died and Queen Victoria acceded to the throne. On 27th June, at Kensington Palace, the Queen invested Lord Durham with the insignia of the Order of the Bath, as she recorded in her diary:

‘I conferred on him the Grand Cross of the Bath. I knighted him with the Sword of State, which is so enormously heavy that Lord Melbourne was obliged to hold it for me, and I only inclined it. I then put the ribbon over his shoulder.’¹⁰

Two days later, Palmerston wrote to Durham to send him the insignia of the Order of St Andrew, together with the Queen’s permission to accept and wear it. This information must have been conveyed to St Petersburg very promptly since Ralph Milbanke, a member of Durham’s suite left behind in the Russian capital who had recently seen the Tsar at Peterhof, where he presented letters from Queen Victoria to the Emperor, was able to write to Durham on 15th July 1837:

‘...I assure you that he spoke of you in the most friendly & flattering manner & seemed much pleased that the Queen had presented you with the order of St André before the arrival of a letter which he had written to H.M on the subject.’¹¹

On 1st July 1837 Queen Victoria appointed Lady Durham one of her Ladies of the Bedchamber. Durham must have felt that his family motto ‘le jour viendra’ (the day will come) was finally justified. Speculation was rife in society as much as at Westminster about what post might be found for Durham following his return from Russia; as Greville wrote in his diary on 29th June 1837:

‘The eternal question in everybody’s mouth is what is Lord Durham to have, or if it is indispensable that he should have anything... After all, it appears to me that a mighty fuss is made about Durham without any sufficient reason, that his political influence is small, his power less, and that is it a matter of great indifference whether he is office or out.’¹²

If Durham’s day had come, his triumph was to be short-lived: his character and his health gradually combined to destroy him. Canada, divided between French-speaking Lower Canada and English-speaking Upper Canada, was in a state of crisis and Lower Canada ripe for the rebellion that finally erupted in December 1837. Durham was asked to become Governor-inChief and High Commissioner of Canada as early as July 1837 but was reluctant and only agreed in January 1838, following – as he was at pains to point out – a personal request by Queen Victoria to take up the appointment. In accepting the post, Durham made it plain that he would serve without salary but a furore erupted in April 1838 over the expenses of his proposed suite. The Times was loquacious on the subject over a ten-day period early in the month. Firstly, the newspaper questioned Durham’s credentials for the military aspects of the role and, secondly, observed that he would undoubtedly take to Canada both the autocratic splendour that had clearly turned his head at the Court of the Tsar and the severe methods of repression that he had, equally clearly, approved of when in Russia. His Russian decorations were, The Times implied, clear reward by the Tsar for Durham’s acquiescence in Russia’s oppressive policies in Poland. He was mocked by the newspaper as ‘Czar and Autocrat of all the Americas’ and as a ‘Brummagen Napoleon’, and attacked for his supposedly unpatriotic acceptance of foreign honours and particularly his Russian Orders: The Times regularly referred to him as ‘the noble Grand Cross of ST ANDREW’. He was criticized for the size, splendour and cost of his proposed batterie de cuisine, for the number of paid military aides-de-camp that he had requested and for his ordering of numerous uniforms: the expression ‘gilt gingerbread’ was used in condemnation of such apparent frippery. Expenditure of a type that would have appeared wholly normal to an aristocrat of Durham’s character and wealth about to set out on a mission in which he had been given almost dictatorial powers for the suppression of rebellion clearly irritated The Times but provoked no public reaction from that newspaper’s target. Given the size and nature of the expenditure undertaken by Durham in preparation for his Canadian mission, it was most probably at this time, in early 1838, that he commissioned the metal stars of his Orders of Knighthood, together with their boxes and their travelling trunk, from Rundell, Bridge & Co., Goldsmiths and Jewellers in Ordinary to Queen Victoria.¹³

Durham arrived in Canada on 29th May 1838, whereupon he and his staff immediately began to reorganise Canada’s administrative structure. Having achieved only controversy and having embarrassed the British government by exceeding his powers, Durham resigned in October 1838 and left the following month, after five months in Canada. Subsequent publication, initially in The Times but afterwards as a Parliamentary Paper, of a ‘Report on the Affairs of North America’ caused further controversy, particularly over its authorship, but was later hailed – until the post-colonial historical revisionism of the 1970s – as a ‘blueprint for the Commonwealth.’¹⁴ In its recommendation for the union of Lower and Upper Canada with a limited degree of self-government, the Report might have so qualified but for significant omissions revelatory of a lack of comprehension of the problems involved. Durham’s time in Canada weakened his already fragile health and undermined the beginnings of a reputation as a diplomat and he died, as had so many of his near relations in the recent past, of tuberculosis on 28th July 1840.

Lord Durham’s memorials are few: a grand ‘Greek’ temple on Penshaw Hill in his native county and The Reform Club in Pall Mall are tangible, as are the paintings and other lares et penates commissioned and collected by one of the richest men in Britain in the course of a comparatively short life. This magnificent collection of insignia of national Orders of Knighthood, conferred upon this mercurial and troubled aristocrat over a period of some five years, is testament to the short space of time in which he achieved so much and looked as if he could achieve anything: perhaps, had he lived, he would have. Now these pieces remain to record his achievements and the regard in which he was held by an Emperor, his Sovereign and the elected monarchs of two European nations: like Lord Durham himself, they splendidly represent the age and culture in which they were created.

¹ New (1929), p. 203.

² Lambton Mss.; Lambton Mss.; correspondence Lord Durham with King Leopold and Lord Durham’s diary of the journey to Russia July-September 1832. It is evident from a surviving exchange of correspondence between Lord Durham and the Belgian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Goblet, in March and April 1833 that Durham had been invested by the King with the Grand Cross in October 1832, even though the decree formalising the honour was dated 10th March 1833.

³ 25th June 1835; New (1929), p. 279

⁴ New (1929), p. 292.

⁵ Reid (1906), II, p. 26.

⁶ Reid (1906), II, p. 39.

⁷ New (1929), p. 297.

⁸ New (1929), p. 299.

⁹ Reid (1906), II, p. 126.

¹⁰ New (1929), p. 299.

¹¹ Lambton Mss.; correspondence, Ralph Milbanke to Lord Durham. Copies of the letters exchanged between the Tsar and King William IV and the Tsar and Queen Victoria, in which Nicholas asked both monarchs to invest Lord Durham with the insignia of the Order of St Andrew, remain in the Lambton Mss..

¹² Reeve, H. (ed.), The Greville Memoirs: a journal of the reigns of King George IV, King William IV and Queen Victoria by the late Charles C.F. Greville Esq.(London, 1888), Vol. IV, pp. 7-8.

¹³ For details of the attacks on Lord Durham in The Times, see that newspaper for 3rd-7th, 9th and 13th April 1838.

¹⁴ Martin (2004).

Stephen Wood MA, FSA, with special thanks to Miss Hester F. Borron, Archivist, Lambton Mss..

Bibliography:

Cooper, L., Radical Jack: the life of John George Lambton..., London, 1959.

Martin, G., ‘Lambton, John George’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004.

New, C. W., Lord Durham: a biography of John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham, Oxford, 1929.

Reid, S.J., Life and Letters of the first Earl of Durham, 2 vols., London, 1906.

Thorne, R.G., The House of Commons 1790-1820, Vol. IV (members G-P), London, 1986, pp. 364-370.

Veldekens, F., Le Livre d’Or de l’Ordre de Léopold et de la Croix de Fer, Brussels, 1858.

Sotheby's would like to thank Morton and Eden with their help in cataloguing this lot.